I made this to follow my girlfriend

“At midnight, fireworks in the plaza. No photographs—you know what fireworks are like. Tawdry, staggering, irresistible, like human love. Live stars fall on twenty thousand people massed in a darkened square. Some cry out, get burned, applaud. No star falls on me, although I try to position myself. Will you say you cannot make out my face in the dark? you heartless creature. At the end of the fireworks we burn down the cathedral, as is traditional. So dazed with light and sulfur by now, there is no question it is the appropriate finale. Tomorrow morning, when we try to celebrate Saint James’s solemn Mass amid the charred ruins, we will think again. But fireworks are always now, aren’t they? like human love. ¡Corazón arriba! When is a pilgrim like the middle of the night? When he burns.”

In his essay, “Masculinity as Spectacle,” Steve Neale seeks to extend Laura Mulvey’s work on the male gaze and to challenge her assertion that the male or male-identified spectator can never look upon the male body as an erotic object. To challenge Mulvey’s assertion, Neale identifies the mechanisms mainstream Hollywood cinema uses to represent the male body as erotic. One way of doing this, Neale argues, is by making the male body the target of violence. In the war film, a soldier can hold his buddy – as long as his buddy is dying on the battlefield. In the western, Butch Cassidy can wash the Sundance Kid’s naked flesh – as long as it is wounded. In the boxing film, a trainer can rub the well-developed torso and sinewy back of his protege – as long as it is bruised. In the crime film, a mob lieutenant can embrace his boss like a lover – as long as he is riddled with bullets. Violence makes the homoeroticism of many “male” genres invisible; it is a structural mechanism of plausible deniability.